Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Saturday School: NBA Inside Stuff (1990)

When NBC was the broadcast home for NBA basketball in the early 90's, the network and the league decided to develop a Saturday morning series (Saturday afternoons, actually) that would recap the week's action and have profiles on certain players. Sort of like This Week In Baseball, which usually ended its season in October back then, but now ends when the Major League Baseball regular season does.

And, so, in 1990, NBC introduced NBA Inside Stuff, a weekly magazine series hosted by former NFL player-turned-analyst Ahmad Rashad. Once the Association decided to end its partnership with NBC, the series shifted over to ABC, and Rashad went with it. However, due to college football commitments, ABC often shuffled Stuff to Sunday afternoons, resulting in a decline in viewers and ratings, and ABC finally cancelled the series in 2005. However, if Wikipedia is to be believed, Stuff lives on, currently airing on NBA-TV in a floating slot and hosted by Olympic swimming champion-turned-cable personality Summer Sanders.

Following is a 1994 episode devoted to "The Round Mound of Rebound", Charles Barkley.